This week the appeal of former Chadian president Hissène Habré started before the Extraordinary African Chambers (EAC) in Dakar. Habré was convicted in May last year of war crimes, crimes against humanity and torture and sentenced to life in prison. The appeal has been mainly legal challenges from the defence and questions about the courts decisions on reparations. The sessions are being broadcast live but in the court in Dakar the public gallery has been largely empty and Habré himself has not attended the hearings.

From the IJT archives here's Thierry Cruvellier's 2016 story about how the Habré case can be a model as an alternative to international tribunals such as the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) and the International Criminal Court (ICC).

The closing arguments in the case against former Bosnian Serb military commander General Ratko Mladic finished up last week. The 1992-95 war in Bosnia ended over twenty years ago and Mladic's is the last trial for the tribunal which has seen interest in its trials waning, is this case too little, too late or did the tribunal save the best for last?

Justice Tribune spoke to Iva Vukusic about the significance of the case and the closing arguments of the parties. Vukusic is former journalist who also worked in the prosecutions office of the Bosnian state court's war crimes chambers and is now a PhD candidate at Utrecht University where she focuses on paramilitarism during the 1990s wars in the former Yugoslavia.

During December 2016, the Malian authorities put on trial former coup leader General Amadou Haya Sanogo along with 17 other military men for their roles in kidnapping and killing 21 elite Malian soldiers who had been accused of leading a counter-coup against Sanago and his followers.

Abdoulaye Guindo, a journalist with Malian daily online Proces-Verbal, has been covering justice efforts in Mali for many years. But this trial was different from any other he has covered.

06 December 2016 by Stephanie van den Berg, The Hague (The Netherlands)

The first day of the trial of former LRA commander Dominic Ongwen did not exactly go as planned for ICC prosecutor Fatou Bensouda. Whereas usually the opening of a case gives a podium to the prosecutor who can make sweeping statements about the responsibility of the accused for the atrocities they are charged with, in this case the Ongwen trial started with the defendant and his defence strategy squarely in the spotlight.

There’s wild jubilation in Banjul the Gambia’s capital, after a tense 36 hours of vote-counting combined with a complete internet and messaging black-out for “security reasons”, with the news that the head of the country’s independent election commission Momor Njie has declared the 22-year rule of president Yahya Jammeh over.

Jammeh was attempting to head for a fifth term in power, and had been reported as saying he was “proud to be a dictator” and that Allah would keep him in power for a billion years.

To prepare for the upcoming Assembly of States Parties to the International Criminal Court we have teamed up with several ICC observers to create a series of podcasts about the issues that will be on the agenda, both officially and unofficially during the yearly gathering of the court's member states. Find our talk with Alix Vuillemin of the Coalition for the International Criminal Court here. On the issue of African withdrawals from the court we spoke to Dov Jacobs, assistant professor, ICC defence counsel and blogger. That podcast is here.

On the first day of the ASP we met with Liz Evenson of Human Rights Watch to go over how the court and the prosecutors select cases to investigate and take to trial and the possible impact of Russia's announcement that is was withdrawing its signature from the Rome Statute. Click here to hear what she had to say.

When state representatives and a huge host of justice NGO’s gather on Wednesday in The Hague – along with International Criminal Court staff themselves – for a week of debate about the court and setting its direction for the next year, there’ll be one major topic: the withdrawal from the court by three African countries. Burundi, South Africa and the Gambia have all announced their decisions within that last month. But the meeting itself will be about far more than that and will throw up several interesting stories for ICC-watchers.

On September 27, the International Criminal Court (ICC) delivered its judgment in the case of Ahmad Al Faqi Al Mahdi. The Islamist was sentenced to nine years for the single war crime of attacking protected objects. The case was hailed as a great success. It was short trial, the court's first guilty plea followed by a swift verdict [IJTblog]. But by accepting the prosecutor's arguments that Al Mahdi was only guilty of a single war crime, was the population of Mali let down badly?

--- In this special guest blog for IJT by Sebastian Green Martinez, lecturer at the University of Buenos Aires, who has followed the Al Mahdi case closely, argues the court should have tried the Malian for persecution over the destruction of mosques and mausoleums in Timbuktu---

Two countries announced their withdrawal from the International Criminal Court (ICC) last week. The decisions of the governments of Burundi and South Africa are motivated by domestic politics and fit a broader development seen in other countries: scapegoating international affairs for local failures.

After the president of Burundi signed a law to leave the International Criminal Court (ICC) on Tuesday, the central African country is likely to become the first state to withdraw from the court's founding treaty. Now, experts say, both Burundi and the ICC, will get caught up in making largely symbolic moves in a race against time.

When Pierre Nkurunziza signed law no 1/14 of 18 October 2016, he became the world's first president to lead his country out of the ICC. With his signature under the “law concerning the withdrawal of the Republic of Burundi from the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court” the president approved previous decisions by the senate and the national assembly. This is the first time a country has decided to leave the court which opened its doors in 2002. Burundi has been in turmoil and on the radar of the international community since early 2015. Both the ICC and the United Nations are looking into the violence there which has left hundreds of people dead.[IJT- 194]